But it was more fun when we mixed it up. So if people from the aquarium went with finance department, and the marketing department, and somebody from Kids’ Kingdom, then people who never talked or knew each other got to know each other, found out what personality this person was,… Read More
What’s the three most dangerous words in the adult education language?… Read More
They had different horse-onalities, and so the keeper would have one horse here, and this horse was calm and you could barely make it move. And then you put him on the lead rope with my barrel horse who’s running circles around them and scaring them to death, and they… Read More
He’s not gonna respect you. Horse C over here, my husband’s horse, is a “make me” horse. So you gotta make him do it. I mean, he’s literally the top dog and he’s not gonna do anything unless it’s his idea. So you gotta make him think it’s his idea. Read More
We’ve sent everybody through this training program. And over 16 years we trained 140 some of my staff members. I ended up sending people from every single department. Finance people went, accounting people, the entire maintenance team went one year, one session. They all went together. They wanted to go… Read More
And so they learned, through this training program, how to read the animal and how to move the animal around. And we would have six to eight different horses in the arena at any one given time, with people on the lead rope. Read More
I don’t know how to get it over there?… Read More
And we’d switch horses, because the horses had different “horse-onalities”, right?… Read More
But they’re on the end of the line, and they’ve got this horse, and they gotta get it over there. Read More
Well, how do I get it over there?… Read More
I brought horses from my farm, the trainer brought horses from his farm, and then we put people in a barn. So in the morning they would have classroom classes, and then the afternoon they would go to a barn close by, and they would end up in a stall… Read More
And it was so cool, because here you’ve got people, and they don’t know the language. They don’t know the language, they don’t speak horse, or elephant, or tiger, or rhino. Read More
They don’t speak that language, right?… Read More
What’s this animal thinking about, what does this animal need?… Read More
And then tailoring your care and training program to that animal’s needs as opposed to what we wanna make ’em do. So instead of trying to get the horse to go into the barn, instead of trying to make the horse go in the barn, we wanted the horse to… Read More
And I was searching for a way to evolve and improve our care of, particularly the elephants, but all of our animals. I wanted to, to develop a new model for keeper training and to look at a new way to look at the animals in our care and how… Read More
And so that most closely matched. So we started bringing that program in, and we started doing that program. And literally, it’s a very good program where it teaches you to read body language, teaches you to read the animal, and to figure out what kind of animal this is,… Read More
And that most closely matched our Elephant program, because of course, we don’t put halters on our elephants to lead them around, right?… Read More
So what we did was we would put hay far away from the barn. So they would have to go out and get the hay. We’d put it further away the next time we put it out, so that we would encourage them to walk and to move. And as… Read More
They are content and happy animals. So space is not really the issue. You need to provide ’em some space, of course, but they don’t have to have hundreds and hundreds of acres to roam, because they don’t do that. Even at the ICC, where we have huge pastures, huge… Read More